No Strings
No Strings is a musical drama with book by Samuel A. Taylor and words and music by Richard Rodgers. No Strings is the only Broadway score for which Rodgers wrote both lyrics and music, and the first musical he composed after the death of his long-time collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II. The musical opened on Broadway in 1962 and ran for 580 performances. It received six Tony Award nominations, winning three, for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Best Original Score and Best Choreography.
For other uses, see No Strings (disambiguation).No Strings
Richard Rodgers
1962 Broadway
1963 West End
2003 Concert Production
Productions[edit]
The world premiere of No Strings was at the O'Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall) in Toronto. The U.S. premiere was at the Fisher Theater in Detroit, where the show ran from January 15 to February 3, 1962.
The musical opened on March 15, 1962, at the 54th Street Theatre in New York. It ran for slightly more than six months before transferring to the Broadhurst Theatre, where it continued until August of the following year, for a total of 580 performances and one preview. Joe Layton was both director and choreographer, with Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley starring. Carroll won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, a first for an African-American. Barbara McNair and Howard Keel replaced them later in the run.
In December 1963, an equally successful production in London, starring Art Lund and Beverly Todd, opened at Her Majesty's Theatre.
In 2003, a staged concert production was held at New York City Center as a part of its Encores! series. This production starred James Naughton and Maya Days and was directed and choreographed by Ann Reinking.[1]
Synopsis[edit]
Fashion model Barbara Woodruff, living in Paris, meets and falls in love with expatriate American, David Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who has suffered from an intense case of writer's block since his arrival in France. She attempts to restore his confidence in his creativity, but the easy life he's enjoying, flitting about Monte Carlo, Honfleur, Deauville, and St. Tropez, is too much of a distraction. Concluding that he can work only if he returns home to Maine, he invites her to go with him; but, realizing they have no future together, they part with "no strings" attached.[4]